Today was supposed to be a restful day in preparation for Michele and girls trip to North Carolina. I suppose it was, but I got several things done. Not exactly what I wanted, but good stuff.
Computing
First, I began to rewire the house network. For various geeky reasons, I wanted to have my main PC see the internet with a static IP, not behind a firewall and also see into the network behind my firewall into the the other computer. This requires the install of a second network card and faith in my firewall software not to bridge the networks.
Don't tell me I should be behind the hardware firewall, I wants what I wants...
While monkeying around in the box to install the card I did a bit of cable maintenance and other tidying up.
I got the networks up and running and everything worked great, without issue and I could hit the Tivo from my main computer.
I went and did some other things like take the kids to the game store and lunch.
When we returned home I began to try to extract some video from the Tivo. The transfer started, and for some reason the computer blue-screened and rebooted. Windows XP never does this to me. Like OS X and linux, the OS is fairly rock solid with apps crashing, but rarely the OS dumping.
It keep happening and I looked up the specific error code. Ram Problems. Ram Problem? WTF? The RAM must have been knocked loose earlier int eh day I guessed. I reopened the case and reached in. The RAM was hot, almost too hot to touch. Something was wrong. The RAM I use has a frigging heatsink on it.
I touched the elaborate heat sink for the CPU and it was even hotter. Uh-oh. I checked the main CPU fan, and indeed, I had unknowingly unplugged the fan while doing my maintenance. I plugged it back in and rebooted. Everything was fine. It does make me happy that the comput can run half the day with no fan at all and the case closed. All my effort to put in good heat sinks was worth it.
Tivo
The Tivo is now completely hacked. I've installed both TyStudio and TivoWeb.
With TyStudio I can extract video directly from the Tivo and convert it to usable video formats. This afternoon I turned an episode of Good Eats into an SVCD and an episode of Da Ali G Show into a DVD file.
With TivoWeb I can control my Tivo from a web interface. There's pretty much nothing I can't control with the TivoWeb interface.
All I need is the DVD burner and I'll be in heaven...
Geekage
Michele needed a specific audio clip from a film. It was only available as a streaming RealAudio clip. In case you find yourself in a similar situation, you may need:
RealAudio to WAV Converter
WAV to MP3 Converter